Polygraph

THE MAN responsible for subjecting scores of his fellow State Department employees to the mental torture of polygraph tests confessed at a Senate hearing last week that "I took a lie detector test and did not do well on it, and what I learned from that is that they are very unreliable devices."Robert Lamb, as assistant secretary of state for diplomatic security, had asked for a leak investigation -- complete with polygraph "fluttering" -- into the revelation to the press that Felix Bloch was suspected of being a Soviet spy: "We had to find out how this was getting out there."

Polygraph tests for three top officials at the Baltimore City Detention Center began Sunday, in an effort to determine the extent of the corruption federal investigators allege plagued the jail. Rick Binetti, a spokesman for the Maryland Department of Public Safety and Correctional Services, declined to comment Sunday on the outcome of the polygraph tests for interim jail administrator Ricky Foxwell and two deputy administrators. The corrections department's internal affairs unit and Maryland State Police investigators administered the polygraphs, and the information gleaned from them could factor into potential disciplinary actions or the decision to prosecute.

An Anne Arundel Circuit judge ruled yesterday that a statement to a polygraph expert by a teacher charged with leaving a blind, handicapped student in a storage closet last winter cannot be used by prosecutors because it was coerced.Judge H. Chester Goudy ruled that Susan Hope Pagano's statement to Lloyd White, a state-appointed polygraph expert, that she "felt guilty about what happened" was made after a promise that Ms. Pagano would not be charged if she passed the lie detector test.Ms.

State corrections secretary Gary D. Maynard ordered polygraph tests Friday of top administrators and "integrity reviews" of every employee at the Baltimore City Detention Center in an effort to root out corruption at the jail. Maynard has moved his office to the facility from Towson to oversee a review of leadership, staff and operations amid allegations that the Black Guerrilla Family gang developed broad power inside the jail, a spokesman said. More than two dozen inmates and correctional officers in the city jail are charged in a scheme that officials say involved the smuggling of drugs and other contraband, including cellphones, into the facility.

CHICAGO - Because lying is more work for the brain than telling the truth, scanning the organ that holds our deepest secrets could be the ultimate way to separate fact from fiction, researchers said yesterday. Using a brain-scanning technology known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers were able to determine when subjects were not telling the truth as well as with a conventional polygraph. Ultimately, they say, the technology should prove to be even more accurate than the decades-old method, which is correct about 90 percent of the time and remains inadmissible in most court proceedings.

Not long after reports surfaced that CIA turncoat Aldrich Ames had passed a lie detector test while spying for the Russians, an FBI agent told a conference of polygraph experts that he'd taught his 10-year-old son how to beat the machine."

WASHINGTON -- The crackdown on leaks at the Central Intelligence Agency that led to the dismissal of a veteran intelligence officer last week included a highly unusual polygraph examination for the agency's independent watchdog, CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson, intelligence officials with knowledge of the investigation said yesterday. The polygraphs, which have been given to dozens of employees since January, are part of a broader effort by CIA Director Porter J. Goss to re-emphasize a culture of secrecy that has included a marked tightening of the review process for books and articles by former agency employees, according to a lawyer who represents many authors who once worked for the CIA. Authors say the agency's Publications Review Board has been removing material that would easily have been approved before.

Although it was an extraordinary story, it never occurred to her that police would doubt it.A man with a gun had abducted her from her family's horse farm one spring morning and raped her, the 19-year-old told Howard Countyofficers last year.But there was no sign of force; no witnesses. Suspicious, police requested that she take a polygraph. She failed."We know you're lying," she recalled the polygrapher saying.Doubt spread through her neighborhood. Relatives didn't believe her. Police demanded the truth.

When physicist Wen Ho Lee first denied leaking U.S. nuclear secrets to the Chinese, authorities from the Department of Energy in 1998 wired him to a polygraph to see if he was lying. The Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist passed. But when a polygraph expert from the FBI looked at the same test results later, he concluded that Lee had not told the truth. How could the same lie detector test lead investigators to exactly opposite conclusions? The case of Lee, who eventually pleaded guilty to one felony count of mishandling classified information, has left law enforcement experts trying to answer the same fundamental questions that have existed since the invention of the lie detector 80 years ago: Does the polygraph actually work?

The FBI will soon begin giving polygraph exams to scores of employees at the Army's bio- defense center at Fort Detrick in Frederick and at Dugway Proving Ground in Utah to see if a government insider mailed the anthrax that killed five people last fall, an FBI official confirmed last night. In the course of the eight-month investigation, lie- detector tests have been given to a small number of scientists who had access to anthrax, including about 10 people at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick.

Annapolis Police Detective John Lee has been named the Maryland Polygraph Association's vice president for law enforcement. Police said Lee has been with the department for 18 years. The association is composed of polygraph examiners from law enforcement, government and private industry. andrea.siegel@baltsun.com

By Jennifer McMenamin and Jennifer McMenamin,jennifer.mcmenamin@baltsun.com | November 1, 2008

For almost three years, Trent L. Banks has insisted to police, prosecutors and judges that he did not shoot at his girlfriend in March 2006 after she slashed his car tires over his infidelity. Yesterday, a Baltimore County judge who granted Banks the unusual opportunity to take a lie-detector test to prove his innocence shared the results with him. They were not good. The report, Circuit Judge Lawrence R. Daniels said in court, indicated that Banks "showed deception" in answering questions about the attempted murder of his then-girlfriend as she drove from an apartment complex in the Parkville area.

WASHINGTON -- The crackdown on leaks at the Central Intelligence Agency that led to the dismissal of a veteran intelligence officer last week included a highly unusual polygraph examination for the agency's independent watchdog, CIA Inspector General John L. Helgerson, intelligence officials with knowledge of the investigation said yesterday. The polygraphs, which have been given to dozens of employees since January, are part of a broader effort by CIA Director Porter J. Goss to re-emphasize a culture of secrecy that has included a marked tightening of the review process for books and articles by former agency employees, according to a lawyer who represents many authors who once worked for the CIA. Authors say the agency's Publications Review Board has been removing material that would easily have been approved before.

Citing an increase in burglaries, auto theft and white-collar crime in Carroll County last year, Sheriff Kenneth L. Tregoning asked the county commissioners yesterday for an additional $240,000 to run the Sheriff's Office and the county Detention Center in fiscal year 2007. Tregoning said that residents take pride in the county's historically safe communities, but the 9.5 percent rise in these nonviolent crimes represents the third-highest increase in the state. With the county's growing population, youth crime has also shot up in recent years, raising the number of juveniles the detention center transports to other facilities, said Maj. Stephen C. Reynolds, the center's assistant warden.

Investigators looking into the still-unsolved death of Jonathan P. Luna are exploring the theory that the federal prosecutor might have been so worried about passing a polygraph test that he took his own life, a source familiar with the probe confirmed yesterday. The polygraph exam was part of an FBI investigation into about $36,000 of missing money from a robbery case handled by Luna. The prosecutor had access to the money, as did other officials and courthouse workers who took lie detector tests, the source said.

Fact: My favorite question from the polygraph exam Rafael Palmeiro's agent set up last June to help Palmeiro prove his innocence: "Do you recall ever secretly doing anything that would have caused shame or dishonor to your family?" Opinion: Maybe it's just me, but I think this would have been a better question to ask: "Have you ever taken steroids?" Fact: My second-favorite question from the exam: "In the past year, did you ever seriously think about violating your personal beliefs by doing something unlawful?"

From the beginning, Baltimore homicide detectives had doubts about Richard Allen Nicolas' story of an unidentified man firing a bullet into his car and killing his 2-year-old daughter, Aja. One clue was that his muffler was cold, indicating the car had been parked near a Northeast industrial park a lot longer than he said it had.But it was not until a computer voice stress analyzer -- a device purported to detect whether a person is telling the truth by...

A state bill that would prohibit police from asking rape victims to take polygraph tests appeared headed for an early grave yesterday after the Senate Judicial Proceedings Committee defeated it.The bill would prohibit police and prosecutors from asking victims of a sex crime to take a polygraph unless the accused took one first and passed.An identical measure is still pending in the House of Delegates. Harford County Del. Mary Louise Preis said yesterday that she plans to redraft her bill and bring it to a vote in the House Judiciary Committee in the next couple of weeks.

CHICAGO - Because lying is more work for the brain than telling the truth, scanning the organ that holds our deepest secrets could be the ultimate way to separate fact from fiction, researchers said yesterday. Using a brain-scanning technology known as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), researchers were able to determine when subjects were not telling the truth as well as with a conventional polygraph. Ultimately, they say, the technology should prove to be even more accurate than the decades-old method, which is correct about 90 percent of the time and remains inadmissible in most court proceedings.

By Jerry V. Haines and Jerry V. Haines,SPECIAL TO THE SUN | October 26, 2003

IMAGINE HAVING LIVED SUCH an accomplished life that on your tombstone you neglected to mention that you had been ambassador to France, secretary of state, vice president and president of the United States. But then, how many of us are Thomas Jefferson? And how many cities can claim not only a Jefferson, but a Madison and Monroe as well? I suspect that people would love Charlottesville, Va., even without the multi-presidential connection, particularly in the fall, when morning mists cling to the hills and enshroud the two-lane roads that wind past vineyards and horse farms.